Robina’s Blog

16 February, 2023

For the Buddha, the law of karma runs the universe, or, if you like, it’s the natural law of cause and effect within which the universe runs. No one runs it. He didn’t make it up; like any good scientist he observed that this is how things are, and then he presented his findings.

Everything any sentient being, any mind-possessor – Tibetan, semchen – thinks and does and says programs our mind, drops seeds in the mind, if you like, which will ripen, like all seeds, at some point in the future. Nothing goes astray. If you planted the seed, the fruit will come. And if the fruit comes, you must have planted the seed.

For the Buddha, there’s no such thing as a creator and therefore there’s no such thing as punishment and reward – there’s no punisher and rewarder. 

And nor do our parents create us. Sure, they give us our body, but not our mind, our tendencies, our goodness and badness. Our mind is our own and it comes into the egg and sperm fully programmed with countless karmic seeds put there by ourselves in that continuity of consciousness in the past. 

As His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, karma is self-creation. Not a difficult concept to grasp, but so utterly different from our usual religious views and the views of the philosophical materialists.

1. A type of rebirth The first way – the main way – that our karma ripens is the type of rebirth we get. Buddha asserts various realms of existence. Our mind, programmed a certain way as a result of our actions, could go to a dog mother or a human mother, for example, after it leaves the body at death. The mind itself has neither an animal nature nor a human nature, but the karmic seeds we plant attract us to that shape, that form.

In our case, a virtuous karmic seed from our actions of non-killing was triggered at the time of our death, which caused our mind to go to our present mother’s human womb.

2. Our tendencies, our habits, our personality traits As we can see on this planet, plenty of people have a human birth, the fruit of virtue, but it doesn’t follow that we have only virtuous tendencies. Humans kill, lie, steal, and so forth. So the second way our karma ripens is in terms of habits, tendencies. We have negative ones but also, if we’ve practiced in the past, we have positive ones too: they’re our saving grace. But this type of karma also includes any tendencies, such as being good at football or music or math.

None of this comes from our parents; we bring all these tendencies with us from having practiced them before.

3. Experiences similar to the cause This is all the ways we’re seen and treated by others, what happens to us, good and bad. We’re very social beings, aren’t we? We live in relation to others – same with ants and monkeys and dogs. We do things to others and others do things to us. So, whatever happens to us is necessarily the fruit of having done that – and karma is pretty personal. It’s a natural law, so nothing can happen randomly.

We often assume that just because we have nice habits, such as not lying, people in turn would never lie to us or would always believe our words. But no: the second and third ways karma ripens are not connected.

For example, we might lie (from the past habit of lying, the second kind of karma) but someone believes us (from the habit of having told the truth in the past, the third kind of karma). 

Equally, you could tell the truth (from the habit of not lying, the second kind of karma), but people don’t believe you (from the habit of having lied in the past, the third kind of karma).

In other words, we can have good tendencies but have bad things happen to us or have bad tendencies and have good things happen to us. We know this experience!

4. Environmental karma Finally, even the very world we live in, how it impacts upon us, is due to our past actions. Non-killing, for example, would ripen as having a healthy body, the food and water and air are delicious, they would nourish us, etc.

All actions we do will necessarily ripen in the future in any of these four ways, so given that we want at least another decent human body, good tendencies, nice things happening to us, and a healthy environment, then we need to cause it now, sow the seeds now: don’t harm others. That’s it. Grade one practice recommended by the Buddha.